Whites Use Black and Brown Criminality To Cover White Criminality
Bloomberg is more evidence of what whites want to forget
In 2015, Michael Bloomberg told an audience at the Aspen Institute:
“Ninety-five percent of murders, murderers, and murder victims fit one M.O. You can just take a description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all the cops...They are male, minorities, 16 to 25. That’s true in New York; that’s true in virtually every city.”
In his speech, Bloomberg also justified throwing kids up against a wall and frisking them; he said New York puts cops in minority neighborhoods because “all the crime” is in minority neighborhoods.
For sociologists like Tressie McMillan Cottom, crime must be another way that “Whiteness necessitates black subjugation” because Bloomberg’s white words about crime are more evidence that white criminality needs cover for its crimes. Bloomberg’s white words live in many white minds and mouths—they claim they’re objective; they claim they're focused on saving lives; they claim there's no need or time to ask or find out why.
But if the white causes aren't of interest, neither are the “solutions.” The association of crime and illegality with Blackness and “minorities” has been a widely white effort, and without those forged associations, white crimes couldn’t continue. At least two books are instructive here: Khalil Gibran Muhammad’s The Condemnation of Blackness, and Aviva Chomsky’s Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal.
The Condemnation of Blackness outlines in detail how whites attached Blackness and crime: Remove “Foreign-born whites” from Uniform Crime Reports to focus attention on Black people; use Black criminality to communicate Black inferiority; use Black criminality to justify oppression; consider white criminality temporary, worthy of sympathy, and remediable with social aid. From history, whites have engineered Black criminality, and history doesn't testify alone.
The white process to associate Black people with crime and Mexicans with illegality has similarities. In Aviva Chomsky’s Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal, Chomsky writes that “changes in the law deliberately created illegality, and did so for the purpose of keeping Mexican workers available, cheap, and deportable...” Given the identifiable and traceable purposes and methods, Professor Natalia Molina is right, “illegal immigrant is not race-neutral.”
Toni Morrison said, “[t]he very serious function of racism is distraction...” To apply Morrison's words here—White racism created Black and Brown criminality, and distraction is the very serious function of those racist creations.
White criminality uses Black and Brown criminality to obstruct and escape the justice that humanity demands. The alleged and documented deeds of the dark are decoys and diversions. This allows Darren Wilson; this allows Dylann Roof; this allows Donald Trump; this allows Flint, Michigan; this allows Bernie Madoff; this allows Bloomberg.
Bloomberg isn't alone; he's white. White innocence allows and requires whites to push and project their criminality on people who aren’t white. By design, there's more than meets the eye with crime because crime is not a matter of “What you see is what you get.” It's more like—what you see is what whites did and forget.